Hacker News Reader

Comment by ritchiea | Hacker News Reader

Wherever you work, whatever you do, you have to trust the people you work with for that relationship to be ongoing and productive (i.e. staying out of court). It sounds like you have a problem trusting women not to take you to court rather than a problem with the court system. Which sounds an awful lot like misogyny.

View on HN

With the way things are going, it is not an irrational or unreasonable fear that something you (as a man or a woman) do/say is going to offend someone (man or woman) and land you in trouble. This has nothing to do with man vs woman. Badclient said nothing of men or women... just "sexist remark". Nor was there any mention of anything that would fall under any reasonable definition of misogyny. Your response only furthers badclient's concern over vague definitions (and to some degree overuse/misuse of words as a means to an end).

To be fair he wrote one line which in the context of the thread could easily be perceived as defending sexist hiring practices. He may not have said "man or woman" but he responded to a comment I made where I described a manager of mine who was fond of making sexist jokes and refused to take women seriously as job candidates.

In his position if I wanted to make a more general point about the court system I would have burned a few more sentences clarifying my point.

It would be really awesome if when people read/hear stuff that can easily be perceived in more than one way... they went with the better choice than the worst one. Not everyone perceives things the same way.. so why always assume they meant it the bad way you perceived it rather than finding out what they meant first? I think a lot of this trouble would go away.

Also, badclient wrote exactly one sentence: It is a problem when "sexist remark" has a much more vague definition in court than in everyday life. This is a true concern that does not infer anything about which sex did which sexist thing... only that the definition of "sexist" is dangerously vague. If you think that translates to a "hate of all women", you have projected that upon badclient.

If he wasn't responding to my comment then a general comment about the court system is off topic. I didn't bring up the court system. It would be strange for me to assume he is veering off topic rather than commenting on the situation I described.

The comment appears to be in response to you using the phrase "sexist remark"... and it appears that badclient believes there is a problem with that phrase being too vague. In the context of your comment, it was pretty clear to me that this vagueness is of some concern to badclient because that could land a person in trouble one day for doing something that was not an issue the week before. I think the difference that might be tripping you up is that you were speaking of a specific "man violates rights of woman" situation but badclient was talking of a more general "person violates rights of person" situation. Some people like to pretend that this is only a "man violates woman" topic... when really it goes both ways. Of course it is entirely possible that you don't believe it goes both ways... but then you and I would have a totally different issue... one that I'd opt out of discussing.

EDIT: "both ways" should probably be "all ways" since all parties involved could be the same gender.

I included exactly what I was responding to in my original comment in italics.

> Wherever you work, whatever you do, you have to trust the people you work with for that relationship to be ongoing and productive (i.e. staying out of court)

Americans seem to like having things escalate. Going to court is the first reaction to everything in stead of asking someone to apologize or talking things out. The incentive for going to court also seems to be very high, you can get large sums of money for small things. Money is the biggest reason people work in the first place.

Wow, you just walked the conversion right into jerk territory.

One shouldn't have to rely excessively on trust or luck just to keep himself/herself out of legal trouble.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com